Going Around the Bend

By my calculations, I've just past my six month point and entered my seventh month of piano discipline. I began sometime in mid-January and it is now mid-July. Six months ago I could neither read music nor play anything on a piano except cacophany. For those of you who don't know what that is, it isn't a jazz tune, it means irritating unstructured noise, like cats and bagpipes attempting to communicate with each other while a million slinkies tumble down brass stairwells. I have no idea where that last set of images came from, but it gives you some inkling of what it's like to live in my skull.

Life gets in the way of totally surrendering to obsession. Recently I had a spate of hardware collapse. It was as if an evil spirit had possessed my house and began killing all my machinery. Within a two-week period, my monitor, computer power-supply, motherboard, printer, and scanner had all died. Then the filter pump on the aquarium, and the VW bus belonging to my houseguest wheezed and died like an oil-poisoned walrus in my driveway. This gadget-slaying dybbuk was insatiable.

In the meantime, I had to keep up with my piano practice. I prepay my lessons each month, and be damned if I'll fall behind. Plus, for some reason, this seems extremely important. I can't explain it. It's more than a hobby; this is something I must do. So I ordered replacements for everything and waited. Every day, boxes came via UPS, USPS and FED-EX. I rebuilt the mechanical infrastructure of my life and business. Some of the computer components arrived dead, and had to be returned. More waiting. In the meantime, I made progress on the Schumann piece The Wild Horseman and began work on Raisins and Almonds.

Interestingly enough, the more my external world falls apart, the calmer I get. I think it reminds me of my childhood, which was the utter picture of chaos. Nothing was ever at peace or predictable, so when things fall apart I just stand perfectly still and look for something to fix. This is the starting point. Once you make one thing right, then you move onto the next thing. Iknew fixing the aquarium was a priority so I took care of that first. My Betta Firebolt is a year and a half old--pretty old for a Siamese Fighting Fish--and I coddle the old boy. He eats raw tilapia and a high-vitamin fish food. His six-gallon tank is a palace, with real tropical plants and a small colony of janitor snails to keep it tidy of waste. So his pump was fixed, and he was pleased.

Then the printer and scanner parts arrived, and some computer components--but the motherboard was dead. Unfortunately, I spent four hours rebuliding the beast and when I booted the machine up--nothing. I checked everything out and I had done it correctly. My son and I have built our own computers ever since you could build your own computers, so I knew it was right, but I called tech support. What followed was an exercise in patience, international diplomacy and translingual malapropisms. Diagnosis: Your motherboard is dead, Sahib. I am ravished with the throbbing sorrow. I am terribly terribly terribly unable to help you. So I sent it back. Replacement will be sent any day now.

But the machine eating ghoul hasn't dared touch my piano, and I play on, la-dah-da-dee-dee-dee... Six months now. I have three more lessons, three more songs to learn and I will be on to Book Two.